NewCity

Minding the Gap: creating a blueprint for enrollment success

At some point in my enrollment career, I received an innocuous refrigerator magnet with the British subway reminder to “Mind the Gap”. That magnet never made it home, rather it stayed affixed to various metallic surfaces in my office. I carried it with me for the greater portion of a 26-year career serving admissions and […]

5 Traits of a Successful Digital Project Manager

What does it take to get a digital project up and running and across the finish line? For anything but the smallest project it takes a close-knit team of architects, writers, designers and developers who understand each other’s strengths and share a common vision. In the middle of that team lives your friendly neighborhood project […]

Developing with AI

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Over the last year, NewCity has been experimenting and exploring the new world of AI and chatbots. Last summer reached a fever pitch for image generation tools like Midjourney, Dall E, and Craiyon. We were passing back and forth new image creations generated by the wildest prompts imaginable. As the tools have undergone revisions we’ve […]

Accessibility in the Design Process (Color)

What is accessibility? In web and application design, accessibility means how many people can use your interface. Design trends and standards can make it sleeker, cooler, easier, or harder to use, but every design choice has an impact on the whole system’s usability — and some choices can exclude entire categories of people from accessing […]

Consistent Diagonal Clipping with CSS

Diagonal lines are one of those design elements that web designers love and web developers fear. Breaking up the vertical lines in your page design adds variety to what would otherwise be a rigid grid. But there is a reason most website designs stick to perpendicular lines: the tools used to create layouts in the […]

Getting Hooked on WordPress Hooks

What are Hooks? WordPress can be an imposing environment for new developers. The barrier to entry is low — you can accomplish a lot by pasting snippets into your theme’s functions file — but it doesn’t take long to realize that WordPress is an enormous machine full of moving parts. Every page load requires a […]

Why and How to Add Heat Mapping to Your Analytics Toolkit

Summarizing and reporting data about your website can be difficult to do in an engaging way. Data tables and complex visualizations from Google Analytics show larger trends, but don’t always communicate what users are doing on the page-level: Heatmaps can help you answer these questions. Many tools are low cost and easy to use, and […]

How to personalize website content in Higher Ed

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Chances are if you are responsible for digital or content strategy for your university or college, you’ve had a conversation about how you could use personalization to better engage your audiences and get more conversions. Maybe someone has said “Could we have a personalized web presence like an e-commerce site?”